I have had a phev (diesel electric merc) for the last 2 years – I live in the countryside so lots of small trips (easily manageable with the battery that can do 40km) loads of poke when driving – 190hp diesel and 120hp electric working together.
55k km later and my diesel consumption is 3.5l/100km – not bad at all for a big merc saloon car – the electricity costs are minimal – its a 13kwh battery with about 10 useable so a charge costs me about 1.2 euros – 40km for 1.2 euros is a significant cost savings and also better for the diesel motor, no starting it up for 10 or 20 km trips.
This looks rather significant, especially with the huge VW drop which cannot be blamed on “backward Britain” etc 
Since Britain is “backward”, it’s pretty much irrelevant also regarding EVs. It’s China where things are happening on a big scale now, and they make their own cars (as well as lots of cars that are not their own ). Chinese brands have a hard time in Norway though. Some of them are sold at 20-30% reduced prices right now, and it still doesn’t seem to help. Which is kind of weird, since Volvo is all Chinese for instance, and they still sell some cars.
In Norway, the sales of cars has dropped 25% so far this year compared with last year. Still, EVs have 90% market share. The only Tesla selling, is the Y. The other Teslas are out of the charts. The Y is the best selling car, number 2 is the Toyota bZ4x, then the VW ID.4. However, for each ID.4 sold, 5 Tesla Y are sold The Y is the new Volkswagen, the perfect family car in all it’s digital super-sensible simplicity.
VW is a strange phenomenon. They tried hard with their ID range, and it looked really good, but they appear to have missed almost completely. Try to sit in one and drive it, and you understand why. Too “cheap” and weird on the inside (it simply feels “ouch”), and too expensive. Why anyone would buy the ID.4 or the Toyota is beyond my comprehension , but the Y I understand, even though I would never buy it, unless I was in the mid 30’s with 3 kids The ID.4 and the Toyota can only be explained by lots of (rather seriously) die hard VW and Toyota fans in Norway IMO.
World wide, and thinking more luxury segment and/or super-power, S and X, I think Tesla has completely lost it against Porsche, Audi, BMW, Mercedes + some other brands as well. The S Plaid is seriously cool performance vise. It’s expensive, but not really a luxury car.
You should actually read the article. Not related to the UK.
Also Norway is an island in many ways.
The ratings on Google seem to put the Tesla model 3 as one of the best especially as the price has been reduced. The Y doesn’t seem to appear at all.
Some of the luxury cars look really good but luxury always costs a lot of money when bought new. A few years down the line will they still be a premium price or will they go the way of the Porsche 928, DB7, and many others which are now well affordable to the average person.
In EVs as far as I can see Tesla do have a big advantage as they have combined car manufacture and charging.
Peter wrote:
Also Norway is an island in many ways.
It’s very special regarding EVs for sure, but still very similar to Denmark in that regard. The Tesla Y is the most selling car there as well. It’s number two in Sweden, only beaten, by (you guessed it) Volvo (the XC 60)
Yesterday I came across a Korean made Ssan Yong SUV here in Bulgaria, which I understand is sold here at around 50 k Euros. From a distance it looked pretty much like a RAV 4 and even had the same colour scheme (black roof, white body and black trim). By the looks of it, they use BYD batteries, which make them at least half chinese.
The guy who owns it bought it 2nd hand with some 20 k km for about half that, which is totally stumping as this is a 2024 model delivered last October. However, he is totally raving, sais the car is performing beautifully and he regularly drives from Plovdiv to the sea side and back, which can be done without enroute charge (about 370 to 450 km depending on where he is going) They have a charger at the business he owns (car wash) and he sais it costs about 20 Euros to charge from 20% to full. In comparison, I paid about 70 Euros to fuel my car from empty to full with about 50 liters.
I did not get the exact model name as he drove off but it looks really nice.
So even here in Bulgaria, EV’s are taking off. Without looking for them, I ran into quite a few charging stations in various venues, many people simply charge at home from the garage 220v plug, where they say over night it charges “enough” for what they need.
And I think LeSving is right to say that it is in China where things happen BIG time. BYD has come up massively and has also slashed prices quite considerably, they are easily capable of starting a price war on the American and European offerings with cars which are not in the luxury segment but where normal folks will start thinking. If these cars are sold NEW even here in poverty stricken Bulgaria, they will go like warm bread elsewhere.
I guess EV adoption comes in leaps and bounds, driven by technical (battery tech), political (incentives) and commercial (charging infrastructure) factors so I don’t think we should be surprised to see fluctuations in growth. But growth there will be, and significant, over the next 5 years.
Not long ago we were discussing the prohibitive pricing of EVs. As expected, the Chinese have taken the lead to change that. Others have no choice but to follow, as the Chinese products are not junk.
US EV sales are slowing and the manufacturers are switching over to plug-in hybrids as a way to concurrently satisfy forthcoming state government mandates which have yet to be rescinded, and also satisfy the customer who wants no range limits, isn’t generally very excited about the functional limits of EVs, and may never plug the thing in. Link
“Toyota is almost completely absent from the [battery electric vehicle] market yet will gain more U.S. market share than any other car company this year. Let that sink in,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in an investor note last week. “EVs may be ‘the future’ but are struggling in the present. Hybrid sales are growing 5x faster than EVs in the US.”
It appears to me that one Chinese strategy with EVs is to outcompete the European manufacturers in their own markets using homegrown European regulations to do it, and meanwhile establish worldwide control of the critical materials used by all manufacturers to build them. I don’t think they’ll be successful in establishing that level of control in the US for several reasons: a wealthy EV market already buying mostly Teslas, the likelihood that pure EVs will never be the dominant consumer choice (they’re currently at 7% market share) and that nobody would want to be seen dead in a Chinese car, so they would have to find and purchase more brands like Volvo to mask themselves.
I guess the main booster in Europe was and still is the vision several countries have of totally banning fossil fuel engines rather sooner than later.
The question is, will this mandate make it past lawmakers or even trigger revolutions or see radical parties taking over and rescind all this or will people eventually change over due to the simple need to continue driving
looking at the astonishing (to me) fact that even in low wage countries where there is practically no pressure from the government to this day for electrification of cars, they are taking off anyway, makes me think that there are still quite a few people who see EVs as desirable nevertheless and maybe more so than in places where radical demands for change put people up in arms.
